Entrepreneurship Theories

This website has had a lot of traffic since its inception. Half a million people have been here. We are working on a new book.We want this audience to know about it. This website was mostly created to benefit students of entrepreneurship who are interested in theory. Our new website, on the other hand, is for the typical employee of an organization who is thinking about leaving to start their own company. We want to tell you about Spinout Ventures , a website that we put up to promote our upcoming book titled: "The employee spinout handbook: A primer for prospective employees-turned-entrepreneurs". The book is the culmination of several years of research about employee entrepreneurship and employee spinouts in particular. Employee spinouts are special because they are not part of the parent company's plan. Rather, they are independent companies created by former employees of parent organizations.  Most of what you find on the internet about spinouts will point you instead

The External Enabler Framework ( Davidsson, Recker & von Briel, 2020 ) is a conceptual toolbox developed for analyzing the strategic and fortuitous influence of changes to the business environment in entrepreneurial pursuits. External Enabler (EE) refers to significant changes to the business environment, such as new technologies, regulatory changes, macroeconomic shifts, demographic and sociocultural trends, changes to the natural environment, and the like. The basic assumption of the EE body of work is that every such change will benefit some entrepreneurial initiatives even if it disadvantages other economic activities. EE analysis focuses on those enabled; other frameworks are needed for analyzing negative consequences of change.  The EE concept was introduced as a more workable alternative to “objective opportunity” for realizing the idea of entrepreneurship as a nexus of enterprising agents and favorable environmental conditions ( Davidsson, 2015 ). Unlike the notion of obje

Could one become addicted to the idea of being an entrepreneur? Countries vary in terms of how their people view entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurship as a career path. In some places, entrepreneurship may be viewed negatively, or associated with corruption. However, the prevailing view of the entrepreneur in the Western Media is the heroic entrepreneur meme. These are often outsiders that manage to disrupt incumbencies and are associated with ideas such as democracy, freedom, and liberty. Perhaps the positive view of the practice has led to entrepreneurship becoming as a desirable pursuit for individuals searching for a lifestyle and character to identity with. These types of individuals have been given names over time including the "Wantrepreneur", Veblenian Entrepreneur or "Untrepreneur". These labels refer to individuals who pursue entrepreneurship not with innovative intentions, or a desire to solve a problem, or to satisfy a need--but solely to live the lifestyl

What is a Born Open Startup? A startup that is born open is one that rejects the notion of proprietary knowledge appropriation (e.g,. obtaining patents ). In fact, software patents are probably the born open crowd's worst abomination.   Instead, a born open startup views itself as a part of a ecosystem of firms that work cooperatively and competitively. They typically are autonomous but have some interconnected goals. Open source startups participate in the development of a community of firms with a shared governing policy to prevent the appropriation of the technology. According to Mekki MacAulay, " Open strategy involves the collective production of a shared good in an open fashion such that the resulting product is available to all, including competitors. In the case of open entrepreneurship, 'born-open' startups are entrepreneurial ventures whose business models are designed specifically based around a collective good. Such business models can be effectiv

Distinct from the popular medical/psychological definition of generativity, which defines the concept as a need to nurture and guide younger people and contribute to the next generation, the generativity theory in relation to entrepreneurship focuses on the development of technology stemming from the foundations set by previous innovations. According to Zittrain (2006, p. 1980) generativity refers to “technology’s overall capacity to produce unprompted change driven by large, varied, and uncoordinated audiences”. The keyword here being ‘unprompted’. Zittrain suggests that the innovations and outcomes are unintentional and occur without purposeful intent. He also notes that the outcomes of these activities in turn become the basis for future innovation. Yoo et al. (2010) expands on Zittrain’s definition and illustrates generativity as a layered model where innovation on one layer’s technology can have a cascading effect on other layers. An example of this is a camera using available

Another biological theory is the childhood adversity theory. While researchers have looked at resilience in adults, few have examined the how childhood adversity may affect entrepreneurial intentions.  Using a variant of the underdog theory, which looks at how negative experience shape an individual's resilience. Recent research has looked at samples of entrepreneurs from the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961 and war-torn Vietnam. Both studies find that individuals who endured childhood adversity are more likely to become entrepreneurs.  Both paper use the ‘underdog’ theory of entrepreneurship proposed by Miller and Le Breton-Miller (2017). The gist of the underdog theory is that "negative personal circumstances of an economic, sociocultural, cognitive, and physical/emotional nature may have a … powerful role to play in getting people to become effective entrepreneurs" (p. 3). The theory suggest that life challenges require the development of coping and adaptive skil

The architectural innovation theory of entrepreneurship focuses on changes in product architecture and their advantages/disadvantages for incumbents and new entrants ( Henderson and Clark, 1990 ). The bottom line of the theory for entrepreneurs is that a type of innovation called "architectural innovation", is a promising avenue for new entrant to pursue because it is difficult for incumbent to pursue. The theory starts with the basic idea that a product or service is made up of components that fit together according to some type of design called "product architecture" (Ulrich, 1995). For instance, a bus architecture uses a single point of contact for all the components to connect to. A slot architecture has a unique connector for each type of component. In a sectional architecture, components can be physically arranged in a number of different ways. Modular architectures are those which make it possible to isolate the development of components by standardizing thei